About

Jonathan Alter is an award-winning author, political analyst, documentary filmmaker, columnist, television producer and radio host. He is the author of three New York Times bestsellers: “The Center Holds: Obama and His Enemies”(2013), “The Promise: President Obama, Year One” (2010) and “The Defining Moment: FDR’s Hundred Days and the Triumph of Hope”(2006), also one of the Times’ “Notable Books” of the year. Since 1996, Alter has been a contributing correspondent and political analyst for NBC News and MSNBC. In 2019, he co-produced and co-directed the HBO documentary, “Breslin and Hamill: Deadline Artists.”

After 28 years as a columnist and senior editor at Newsweek, where he wrote more than 50 cover stories, Alter is now a columnist for the Daily Beast and the co-host, with his wife, Emily Lazar, and their three children, Charlotte Alter, Tommy Alter, and Molly Alter, of “Alter Family Politics,” which airs Thursdays at 10:00 a.m. on RadioAndy on SiriusXM, 102. He is the winner of numerous awards, including the National Headliner Award for his coverage of 9/11, the Gerald Loeb Award, and the Book Award from the New Jersey Council of the Humanities. In 2019, he was one of the inaugural inductees into the New Jersey Journalism Hall of Fame.

A Chicago native, Harvard graduate and resident of Montclair, New Jersey, Alter has also written for The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Washington Monthly, Rolling Stone, The Atlantic, The New Yorker, Vanity Fair, The New Republic, Esquire, Bloomberg View and other publications.In the 2013-2014 season, he served as an executive producer of “Alpha House,” a 21-episode half-hour political comedy available on Amazon. He is currently at work on a full-length biography of former President Jimmy Carter.

Which of the F.D.R. Wannabes Actually Understands New Deal Liberalism?

Suddenly, Franklin D. Roosevelt is all the rage. But many Democrats don’t understand what his legacy means.

Jonathan Alter – June 21, 2019

Mr. Alter is the author of “The Defining Moment: FDR’s Hundred Days and the Triumph of Hope.”

The New York Times

Some political ideas are so old they feel new. In his 1944 State of the Union address, an ailing Franklin D. Roosevelt sketched his ambitions for a “Second Bill of Rights” — a vision of “adequate medical care,” “a good education,” “a useful and remunerative job,” “a decent home” and “freedom from unfair competition and monopolies” as the birthright of all Americans.

From the 1930s through the 1970s, American politics took place largely on Roosevelt’s liberal terrain. Since then, even Democratic presidents have often been forced to play on Ronald Reagan’s conservative side of the field.

Suddenly, though, Roosevelt is alive again in the 2020 Democratic primary campaign: His ideas for using government to improve lives echo through stump speeches across Iowa and New Hampshire.

Roosevelt’s dream of “cradle to grave” coverage animates proposals for baby bonds, universal pre-K and Medicare for All. His ambitious and environmentally prescient Civilian Conservation Corps, which employed three million men and planted three billion trees in less than a decade, is the progenitor of the “Green New Deal” and various impressive national service proposals, whether proponents of those plans know it or not. And his famous declaration that “the only thing we have to fear is fear itself” is routinely deployed to blast President Trump for stoking hate and fear.

But there’s a right way and a wrong way to revive Roosevelt. Before we allow anyone to assume his mantle, let’s separate candidates merely seeking inspiration for big ideas from those misappropriating his legacy.

Bernie Sanders, the most explicit of the Roosevelt wannabes, is in the latter category. He has repurposed the “Second Bill of Rights” address on his website to report that Roosevelt was constantly attacked as a socialist, so he must have actually been one — just like the independent senator from Vermont. He’s betting that a younger post-Cold War generation won’t conflate his brand of democratic socialism with communism, as many of their elders wrongly do.

But Roosevelt was an improvisational pragmatist — a “juggler,” he called himself — not a socialist. While his idea for Social Security contained socialistic elements (as did George W. Bush’s 2008 bank bailout), he understood that in a nation of strivers, the concept is a political loser. When asked his political philosophy, he replied: “I’m a Christian and a Democrat, that’s all.”

Today’s jostling Democrats may be cheered to learn that Roosevelt’s political talent was not evident at first. Derided as a pampered lightweight (“Feather-Duster Roosevelt”), he was barely nominated on the fourth ballot at the 1932 Democratic Convention. H.L. Mencken wrote that he would almost certainly lose to the incumbent, Herbert Hoover, in November.

The “New Deal for America” that Roosevelt offered in his electrifying acceptance speech that year contained few specifics. It was, as Senator Amy Klobuchar said of this year’s Green New Deal, “aspirational.” He ran in the fall as an upbeat fuzzy moderate and won mostly because voters despised Hoover.

Even after Roosevelt took office at the depths of the Depression, he had no unified plan, just a vague commitment to “action and action now.” But he quickly made good on that pledge with a dizzying series of inventive programs and structural changes that have inspired “100 Days plans” from Ms. Klobuchar and others.

Not all were embraced on the left. Like President Barack Obama in 2009, Roosevelt in 1933 rejected calls to nationalize failing banks after they reopened. His larger aim was to reform capitalism so it worked better for ordinary people, which sounds a lot like Elizabeth Warren’s agenda.

Senator Warren’s challenge is that today’s economic anxieties might not be powerful enough to drive real change. Roosevelt capitalized on the Great Depression: It helped him offer government jobs, regulate Wall Street, raise taxes sharply on the wealthy, launch huge infrastructure projects and secure a minimum wage — all ideas reprised by today’s Democrats, but in a much stronger economy.

Running for re-election in 1936, Roosevelt said of his big-money critics: “They are unanimous in their hate of me and I welcome their hatred.”

Read more at the link above~~

Jonathan Alter, the author of “The Defining Moment: FDR’s Hundred Days and the Triumph of Hope,” is writing a biography of Jimmy Carter.

Jonathan Alter-04.17.19

Why is Pete Buttigieg suddenly everywhere? Why has he moved so quickly from obscure flavor of the month to serious contender for the Democratic nomination and the presidency? And why does a 37-year-old gay mayor of a small city in Indiana match up so well against President Trump?

The answers lie not only in his appeal as a fresh-faced, hand-crafted product of the heartland—a whip-smart artisanal candidate for the wine-and-brie part of the party; not only in his barrier-breaking age, sexual orientation, and unorthodox political experience, which have helped him stand out from the pack and allowed many Democrats to congratulate themselves for their open-mindedness; not only in his calm and, for a young guy, surprisingly authoritative comportment that can fairly be described as presidential.

Buttigieg is also going viral because in addition to Spanish, French, Italian, Maltese, Arabic, Farsi, and Norwegian, he speaks a compelling form of English. He is fluent in the subtext of American politics—the ideas and phrases that tap into our deeper sense of who we are and what we owe each other and future generations. At least for now, his generational and aspirational themes are working at a more powerful level than policy proposals or ideological positioning, and they lift him above the cut and thrust of the tiresome news cycle.

Want to finance a bold social agenda? Here’s the politically savvy way to do it.

Jonathan Alter – 02.25.19

I’m skeptical of many of the new far-left proposals bubbling up from the presidential campaign. But there’s one that is elegant and potentially historic. The best idea so far—a big idea that can transform the country—is Senator Elizabeth Warren’s proposal for an “ultra-millionaire tax.” It at least begins to address the wealth disparities that are corroding society. It’s politically feasible because it affects only a tiny number of ridiculously wealthy people who will barely feel the pinch. And it raises an astonishing $2.7 trillion dollars over 10 years, enough to fund a wish list of progressive dreams. Every objection to it becomes less convincing on close examination.

The most common conservative response to Warren is that she’s engaged in “class warfare.” But Warren’s target isn’t the “top one percent,” which begins at an income threshold of around half a million dollars a year. It isn’t the top 0.1 percent, where people are earning millions. It touches just the top portion of the top 0.01 percent, whose share of total U.S. wealth quadrupled in the last four decades. This tiny sliver of 75,000 uber-wealthy families—a “class” that could fit in Garland, Texas or Woodbridge, New Jersey—now controls more wealth than the bottom 90 percent of Americans.

So this isn’t “Soak the Rich”—a political loser in a country where most people want to be wealthy. It’s “Nick the Super-Rich.” Under Warren’s plan, inspired by Thomas Piketty’s influential 2014 book, Capital in the 21st Century, and drafted by Emmanuel Sanz and Gabriel Zucman of Berkeley, Americans with a net worth of more than $50 million would pay two percent a year on their wealth over that $50 million. American billionaires (who number around 680 right now) would pay three percent on their wealth over that $1 billion. In most years, two or three percent is far less than the appreciation of their assets. The vast majority of people paying the tax would still be getting richer every year.

Read more at the link above…

Is the Michael Cohen ‘Prague’ Story True?

The reporters behind it are either the new Woodward and Bernstein—or the new Judith Miller.

Jonathan Alter, Maxwell Tani – 12.29.18

Three weeks after the 9/11 attacks, Vice President Dick Cheney was already trying to tie the horror to Iraq. He floated a bogus story that earlier in 2001, Mohammad Atta, ringleader of the terrorist attacks, had met in a Prague cafe with an Iraqi intelligence official.

Now another shadowy meeting in Prague that may or may not have taken place is in the news.

On Dec. 27, McClatchy DC—a reputable news outlet that broke the most important stories about the Iraq War—reported that cell phone tower records obtained by foreign intelligence sources place Michael Cohen (or at least his phone) in Prague in the late summer of 2016. The story says this information, as well as the fruits of electronic eavesdropping by an Eastern European intelligence agency that picked up discussion among Russians of Cohen’s presence in Prague, are now in the possession of the office of Special Counsel Robert Mueller.

If the McClatchy story is true, it has huge implications for Donald Trump’s survival in the presidency. But that’s a major if; unlike many other scoops about the Mueller probe, no other outlet has been able to confirm McClatchy’s reporting. And the McClatchy reporters have made it clear that they have no corroborating evidence of their claims and that some of their sources are indirect at best.

The stakes are immense. If the McClatchy story is validated, it would strongly suggest that Mueller has evidence that in 2016 Trump sent his personal lawyer and fixer to Europe to meet with a high-ranking Kremlin official. The point of the meeting, if it occurred, was ostensibly to discuss Russian concerns that their intrusion in the presidential campaign on Trump’s behalf might be exposed. This would confirm an important section of the (in)famous “Steele dossier” and offer major evidence of Trump’s participation in a criminal conspiracy.

Paying off porn stars, obstruction of justice, corrupt Russian real estate deals—they’re all serious, even criminal, but not in the same league as “Prague” (or another place where Prague-like meetings might have taken place). A meeting or multiple meetings of this kind would be the crown jewels of what Mueller in court filings calls the “core” of his investigation into whether the Trump campaign colluded with Russia to interfere in the 2016 election.

On the other hand, if the McClatchy story is false, it significantly lessens the odds that Mueller can prove a conspiracy case—the only case that is likely to lead to impeaching the president and removing him from office.

Read more at the link above…

The Democrats Who Stand a Chance in 2020

There could be as many as 30 candidates (!). Who can stand out in a crowd like that? Hint: He lost Tuesday.

Jonathan Alter – 11.08.18

The 2018 midterms were hugely significant on their own terms but they also serve as prologue for the Big Show: 2020, a presidential election as critical as any in American history. That’s why it’s not too early to start mulling over it.

Decent people around the world can hold out for another 24 months—especially with the check on President Trump now provided by a Democratic House. But six more years of exposure to Agent Orange should he win reelection would be a world-historical disaster.

As usual in midterms, the talk among pundits and political professionals turned to 2020 before Tuesday’s returns were even complete. With no front-runner on the horizon, the questions were urgent for Democrats and for the more than 30 possible candidates. What did we learn? Who do the results help? Who do they hurt?

We learned that a pink wave is underway and Democrats will likely need to put a woman somewhere on the ticket to keep it cresting. But we also saw that a coalition of women, minorities, and young voters is probably not enough to beat Trump as long as he and other Republicans continue to run up huge totals with non-college educated white men.

We learned that Democrats continue to get shellacked in exurban and rural areas, a big disadvantage not only in blood red states but in states like Ohio and Florida that are critical battlegrounds in the Electoral College. With the approval of Amendment 4 in Florida, Democrats got excited that more than a million felons there will be newly eligible to vote.

This will likely yield tens of thousands of new voters, but they will be dwarfed by the more than 300,000 people who move to Florida every year, many of them conservative “snowbirds” fleeing taxes in the North.

Finally, we learned that the route to victory in 2020 lies in Rust Belt states like Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania—which Trump won narrowly—and Ohio, where he crushed Hillary Clinton. The first three all elected Democratic governors this year, which will help bolster their state parties, and Ohio reelected Sen. Sherrod Brown by more than six points.

Brown—the gravelly-voiced free trade skeptic—was one of the hot names coming out of Tuesday. He sounded like a presidential candidate in his victory speech but so far has tamped down speculation that he might run. If he did, he would neutralize Trump’s advantage on trade, a huge plus, though he doesn’t seem to have the pugilistic skills to deal with the president

Another “lunch bucket” Democrat who isn’t running but should think about it is Montana Sen. Jon Tester, who went head-to-head with Trump on the campaign trail this fall and prevailed. Tester, who sports a crew cut and lost three fingers in a meat grinder on his farm, managed to get reelected in a deep red state despite voting against the nominations of both Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh for the Supreme Court. Trump’s Alpha Male act doesn’t work on him. Montana’s governor, Steve Bullock, who is considering a campaign, might also cut Trump’s margins in rural and exurban counties.

One pleasant surprise about 2018 was that high-quality Democratic candidates and focused voters seemed to realize that this is no time for vicious party in-fighting or ideological purity tests. They’re all Vince Lombardi Democrats now. Lombardi, legendary coach of the Green Bay Packers, said: “Winning isn’t everything; it’s the only thing.”

Read more at the link above…

How CPR saved a young woman’s life (it could save yours, too) – TODAY.com

Alter Books For Sale

The Center Holds: Obama and His Enemies

“Jonathan Alter’s “The Center Holds” offers an elegant, intelligent, crisply constructed account of President Obama’s second two years in the White House and his quiet march to a second term. It will be required reading for any serious student of the Obama presidency, present or future.” The Washington Post

The Promise: President Obama, Year One

“Gives us a new perspective on the 44th president by providing a detailed look at his decision-making. . .and a keen sense of what it’s like to work in his White House. Alter uses his considerable access to the president and his aides to give us an informed look at No. 44’s management style.” Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times

The Defining Moment: FDR’s Hundred Days and the Triumph of Hope

“Alter’s account has a refreshing buoyancy, not unlike its protagonist…describing Roosevelt’s missteps as honestly as his triumphs, it succeeds in bringing a remarkable man back to life.” Ted Widmer, The New York Times Book Review

Between the Lines: A View Inside American Politics, People, and Culture

“A journalist, rather than a pundit, Alter made sure he had the best seat in the house for the transformation of the political and media worlds over the past three decades, and he has recorded those changes with his trademark wisdom and humanity.”Jeffrey Toobin